Showing posts with label Robert Pirsig. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Pirsig. Show all posts

Thursday, July 23, 2020

the language we’ve inherited





The language we’ve inherited confuses (this). 

We say “my” body and “your” body and “his”
 body and “her” body, but it isn’t that way. … 

This Cartesian “Me,” this autonomous little homunculus 
who sits behind our eyeballs looking out through them 
in order to pass judgment on the affairs of the world,
 is just completely ridiculous. 

This self-appointed little editor of reality
 is just an impossible fiction that collapses
 the moment one examines it.



~ Robert M. Pirsig
from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance




Sunday, January 26, 2020

an absence of separateness






One says of him that he is "interested" in what he's doing, that he's "involved" in his work. What produces this involvement is, at the cutting edge of consciousness, an absence of any sense of separateness of subject and object. "Being with it," "being a natural," "taking hold"-- there are a lot of idiomatic expressions for what I mean by this absence of subject-object duality, because what I mean is so well understood as folklore, common sense, the everyday understanding of the shop...Zen Buddhists talk about "just sitting," a meditative practice in which the idea of a duality of self and object does not dominate one's consciousness. What I'm talking about here in motorcycle maintenance is "just fixing," in which the idea of a duality of self and object doesn't dominate one's consciousness. When one isn't dominated by feelings of separateness from what he's working on, then one can be said to "care" about what he's doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one's doing. When one has this feeling then he also sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself.



~ Robert Pirsig
from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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Thursday, September 20, 2018

many routes







Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand

 in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them,
 being content to listen to others who have been there 
and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains 
accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least
 dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination.
 Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes.
 Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will
and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware 
than any of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. 
There are as many routes as there are individual souls.




- Robert M. Pirsig
from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance